Coca Colas Employee Development Policies and Practices in the UK - Case Study Example

COCA COLA (UK) ER AND EE STRATEGIES, POLICES, PRACTICES al Affiliation) Introduction Businesses that aim to reach their sustainability goals have to engage their employees in initiatives that sustain social and environmental policies (Middlesex University, 2015). Other organizations sensed the need to incorporate this option over decades ago, while others have taken time to acknowledge the importance of employee engagement in the organizational operations, values and success. Employee engagement, therefore, is a leading indicator of sustained financial performance, and maintains the correlation between an organization and the social or environmental perceptions of the society (Middlesex University, 2015). Coca Cola’s Employee Development Policies and Practices in UK Coca Cola is a trademark beverage brand that produces its flavour from the Coke seeds. In addition to being the most popular beverage brand worldwide, the company registers massive global sales that make it maintain a significant beverage market share. Like many other successful global entities, Coca Cola UK does not overlook the significance of employee engagement and employee relation. This enables the company to enjoy a competitive market over the rival brands. The Coca Cola UK Company has many divisions that define the brand. Such divisions as the bottlers, the manufactures and the distributors all have specific functions to perform. Therefore, the company manages a network of employees within the UK (Coca Cola Company, 2012). Given the wide nature and vast geographical setting of the UK market, Coca Cola Company had to diversify its operations to envisage multiple production centers and enhance product availability amongst its customer base. Before the year 2008, Coca Cola Company in UK had not adopted a human resource strategy that could guarantee the company a competitive advantage in the UK soft drink market. However, in the wake of increasing developments and global campaigns on the need to implement ethical human resource management, the company undertook drastic measures that initiated the optimization of the human resource. In addition to that, the company unveiled technological advancements that supported the delivery of services, hence improving the employee efficiency and generating positive income for the company. In as much the projects provided the company with a raft of new operational challenges, the results of the implementation of these policies were evident in 2009 (Investors et al., 2015). Evidently, the human resource management at Coca Cola UK prioritizes the good treatment of employees. Through the stipulated frameworks of employee engagement, the company enables the development of employees by giving them a reward for working in the company. In accordance with the company’s human resource team, the strategic focus of employee engagement envisages the creation of an environment that enables the employees to excel in their performance. Besides, Coca Cola UK enables the employees to maintain their ambitions of attaining their career goals while giving adequate room for the development of skills that guarantee their improvement. At Coca Cola UK, the employer realises that the success of the business depends solely on the available human capital that helps in driving the company objectives. As such, the concept of employee work engagement describes the extent to which the employer ensures the involvement of workers and their subsequent commitment to the business (Middlesex University, 2015). Coca Cola UK, facing massive competition in the beverage markets uses internal contemporary issues to measure and promote employee engagement. According to the Coca Cola UK human resource department, at least one in every five employees was highly engaged in their work. However, since the reorganization of the company’s structure in 2008, the company has registered massive response in terms of employee engagement. Through team building, Coca UK continues to register better loyalty and employee productivity. While competition continues to stiffen in the beverage industry in this regional market, competing companies that have high employee engagement tend to outperform the low engagement companies in multiple areas concerning business success. Communication threatens to hinder the efforts of many multinational corporations (Middlesex University, 2015). However, Coca Cola UK has a diverse workforce that exhibits different cultures. Despite the fact that majority of the employees speak the native English, efforts to ensure balance in the company structure obligated Coca Cola UK to employ citizens from diverse lingual backgrounds. Nevertheless, the company employs a more positive supervisory communication style. In the flat organizational structure, however, the company has to appoint team leaders who help in ensuring effective coordination of the activities between departments. These team leaders have recommendable emotional intelligence that enables them to listen to the employees’ requirements. In addition to that, the company stresses the need for each supervisor to consider the communication techniques they use in issuing supervisory orders to the team members. Work place stress represents a large portion of the causes of organisational inefficiency. Besides, the pressures accruing to operating in a competitive market subjects the Coca Cola UK employees to a vast variety of mental pressures such as fatigue. In light of this information, Coca Cola offers mental health services to the employees. Mental health services aim at boosting the employee relationships and bridging the existent gaps in the diverse workforce. Such services as team building exercises help the employees to build on their informal relationship outside the office (Middlesex University, 2015). This relationship tends to trickle into the formal organizational practises. Coca Cola UK ranks amongst the best employer with strong leadership. Indeed, strong leadership is the core differentiator between average companies and the best employers. In the Coca Cola UK structure, the leaders are decisive, and provide a clear vision of the company’s future. Over and above their competence, the leaders at Coca Cola UK are comfortable with uncertainty, and understand the emotional side relating to transition and change. This is evident in the recent drop of sales that the company registered in this region. According to health experts, Coca Cola brand had zero tolerance to the increasing nature of lifestyle disease, thereby using a lot of sugar substance in the manufacture of their beverages. Given the strong leadership and the autonomy in decision, the company management engaged the employees in finding a possible solution to silence the critics and maintain its dominant brand name. The above example clearly illustrates the fact that both the company and its employees view leadership as the ingredient that is responsible for employee engagement. While Coca Cola UK struggles with external factors such as competition, government regulations and consumer behaviours, the competing multinational corporations encounter frequent calls for their leadership to be more accountable at all the levels of the business. Therefore, at Coca Cola UK, the employees view employee relationship as the major driver behind the success of the corporate social responsibility within the company. Employee value proposition within Coca Cola UK helps the company to attain the desired employee engagement. As an employer, Coca Cola UK aims at building a strong reputation as company that delivers on the clearly articulated promises to the employees. Working for the company to attain its SMART objectives, the human resource management puts lucrative incentives that aim at motivating the employees from failing to attain the specific goals. As such, the incentives include overtime allowances, pensions and departmental rewards. Through credible evaluation systems, the company rewards the exemplary employees, while rewarding each employee in the event that the company registers the stipulated benchmarks. The company links together the work streams regarding customer engagement, brand promise, culture, employee value proposition and total rewards. In the employment contracts, the company includes a variety of unique and value elements that have differentiated and strong employee value propositions. The implementation of the human resource management in Coca Cola UK involves the alignment of these processes to match the corporate strategy of the company. This process incorporates the right people, with accurate selection of participants from a formal scheme of talent development. The company employs a talent panel that oversees the engagement of senior management in the company. Besides, the Coca Cola UK Company has professional specialists who play a fundamental role in the provision of guidance and support to the development and design of the talent management approaches. The company also emphasizes on talent management loop. The approach to the human resource management that Coca Cola UK uses depends on the definition of the talent that is appropriate to the advantage of the company. The inclusive approach indicates that employees in all departments and levels in the workforce have a talent. This makes the organization a pool full of total talent (Middlesex University, 2015). The exclusive approach on the other hand includes segregation of staff to exclude the high-value staff. The high-value staff is ranked based on the high potential and high performance. The company has a competency framework that determines the role of each approach in the corporate world. By using the inclusive approach, the company aims at driving specific system alignments with the major purpose of winning the market. Besides, Coca Cola UK aims at instilling a culture of performance that drives the results desired by the company. This approach is necessary in playing a strategic business partner role in the execution of the company’s productivity (Middlesex University, 2015). In contrast, the exclusive approach aims at capturing the external environment as a great place to work by offering inspirational and motivation to the employees’ abilities. This also is crucial in emphasizing the need for diversity in the values of the company. The exclusive approach offers the employees an in depth analysis of disciplined ways that distinguishes an individual as a talent engine. The company also incorporates the use of exclusive approach to stamp an authority as the leader in growth of stock prices through adequate shaping of the company’s intangibles Coca Cola UK provides training and development programs that enables the development of its employees. Such programs, incorporated with coaching and feedback exercises, do not only add value to the employee output but also builds on the careers of these individual employees. During the company’s recruitment exercises, the human resource management team offers on-the-job learning opportunities for the employees, hence emphasizing on employee loyalty. The above motivational exercises all aim at inspiring new talents to approach the company for recruitment, as it has continuously emerged as a great place to work. The Coca Cola University is a training and development institute that offers a platform for the development of the company’s top performers. Open communication remains to the basic tool for employee engagement in Coca Cola UK. Unlike in other companies, the management structure adopted by Coca Cola UK is a flat organizational structure that eliminates the presence of hierarchy within the organization. Flat organizational structures are perfect grounds for effective communication within any company (Middlesex University, 2015). In meetings organized frequently, the employees engage the management in discussing the progress of their performance, training or development as they have experienced working in the company. Indeed, such meetings encourage the participation of employees in the organization In the first quarter of 2014, according to the company, the total volume of carbonated drinks reduced by 1% globally. However, the largest loss was in the UK, where the company registered a 10% drop in the quarterly sales of carbonated drinks (Investors et al., 2015). On the part of the Coca Cola UK, the health institutions have continuously questioned the health standards of carbonated drinks. However, this is a drop from the losses registered in 2008 before the introduction of the effective human resource management practices. Before the introduction of the Coca Cola Classic series, the company faced widespread condemnation for not considering the increase in lifestyle diseases when manufacturing their products. However, the company introduced the Coca Cola Classic, a brand containing four different coca cola drinks: the Coke Life, Diet Coke, Coca Cola Light and the Coke Zero. As explained, this innovative masterpiece was because of effective communication within the organization. These communication frameworks enabled the employees to come up with multiple ideas that bore the conception of the Coca Cola Classic. The reputation of Coca Cola runs more than a century ago, with the global company registering profits for the past 50years. Nonetheless, the company has devoted enough time and resources to revamping and expansion of its plants. All this is done in a bid to remain competitive and maintain the unique brand name created over the years of its existence. Working within the same environment enables the managers and employees to put up the organizational goals together (Middlesex University, 2015). Similarly, the employees have a chance to create a desirable career path that they would like to achieve within the company. In the year 2010, Coca Cola UK enhanced the practical kills of supervisors and frontline managers through the global Coca Cola workshops that had over 50 participants form Coca Cola UK. While striving to create value between the company’s operational frameworks, the organization aims at captivating the emotions of consumers, customers, communities, associates and bottling stakeholders. However, the company argues that this fete is unattainable with inadequate talent within the workforce. Each year, the company sharpens its strategy to envisage the growth of the talent retention programs to guarantee a competitive advantage for the company in the industry, Employee relation practices and programs that are underway in the Coca Cola UK strategy are optimal for their objectives of gaining a competitive advantage. The training and development programs are effective talent retention strategies that are ideal to any prospective employees (Middlesex University, 2015). As earlier stated, the Coca Cola University sharpens the employees’ skills by offering a myriad of courses and training facilities. The basis of the programs offered at this university aim to maintain innovation while upholding originality to the brand of Coca Cola. Therefore, the range of courses offered at the university emphasizes best practices in research, consultation and coaching services. In Coca Cola UK, many of the employees studied consumer marketing, franchise leadership, commercial leadership and people leadership from the Coca Cola University. Such expertise combines perfectly to provide the company with enough innovative power to counter the competition in the market (Middlesex University, 2015). Indeed, technological advancements have worked to the advantage of the company. Through the collective staff engagement, the company achieved cost savings by implementing the new technology within the organizational structure. Furthermore, efficiency of the organization came because of excessive discussion between the management and the employees, which proposed the segmentation of the human resource department in order to maximize the performance of each segment. The regional employee portal and a full time operational call centre links the employees with the managers of each department. This modern mode of communication meets the standards of organizational communication requirements (Middlesex University, 2015). Nonetheless, the company expresses continued employee commitment by devoting funds to the updating and maintenance of the above wave of technological advancements. The teams often chosen in Coca Cola UK have sustainability leaders who are experts in spotting new opportunities, anticipating and evaluating long-term sustainability trends, and developing strategies to reposition the organization to benefit from them. Such exercises act to mitigate the risks associated with change alongside assisting those employees who find it difficult to adapt to the new changes. In the Wakefield Manufacturing plant, Coca Cola UK introduced a version control software and change management for all the industrial programmable devices. This was due to a complaint filed by the employees claiming reduced work efficiency. Nonetheless, the new system required training of the operators on the benefits of implementing the system. Indeed, after continuous education, the company averted the disrupted delivery schedules, the costly delays and minimized the production time. It took nearly two years for Coca Cola to standardize many of their HR policies and how employees were evaluated. It takes collaboration between an employee and a manager to determine how the employee plans to enrich their skills and development. The new technological systems that were introduced in 2008 to track skills should be updated to include tracking of new and acquired skills. Coca Cola’s HR services goal mission is “Right skills, Right position” using the new implemented system could be used to data mine skills for need to fill, mentor positions for hard to fill spots. This system has the ability to identify any gaps of human resource capabilities if an employee should leave the organization (Middlesex University, 2015). For optimal performance, employee relations take into concern the employee workspaces as vital tools for optimal performance of the employees. In the Coca Cola UK setup, the workspaces envisage physical space and the freedom to make individual decisions at the designated workplace. For this reason, the company has an open working space for boosting the employee morale, improving the organizational culture and increasing the productivity of the employees. In addition to that, the company credits the ethical excellence to the employee workspace offered by the adoption of open office arrangements. This is a product of employee engagement to reduce overhead costs. Coca cola UK prides itself in testing and finding the opportunities that the company has to improve on. The event that triggered the restructure f the human resource practices were subject to a survey done considering the necessity to restructure the Coca Cola Refreshments Division. The study completed in 2007 measured the efficiency and effectiveness of delivering human resource services at Coca Cola UK. The main goal of the entire research was to analyse the service delivery to employees at the global level, hence highlighting the need for improvement in specified areas. Recommendations Given the increased involvement of multiple corporations in globalization, the work environment keeps changing at a rapid rate. Nonetheless, Coca Cola UK should realize that workers require versatility and the ability to handle the challenges that come with operating in a diverse working environment. Therefore, the company should put in place refresher courses to re energize the ageing population within the organization and recycle them by posting them into developing markets such as Ukraine. This will increase the awareness of the employees and encourage the expansion of the company into newer markets (Middlesex University, 2015). When Coca Cola UK sees the need for change in the implementation of a program, a team should measure how the change is bringing value to the organization. Besides, the team should determine how to sustain the program to continue value added efforts. Change management is a process in which an organization goes through a change. Effective employee relations should envisage the opinions of all the stakeholders towards the desired change to ensure that the change does not derail the organizational spirit (Middlesex University, 2015). The Coca Cola UK Company, nevertheless, should adopt a hybrid approach towards talent management. This approach envisages both the inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management. Despite the fact that these two approaches have separate basis, the company should use employee branding to fuse the two perspectives together. The leaders of the teams often are the talent holders from the exclusive approach while the group members are talent bearers from the inclusive approach. This will ensure that the talent pools in the company remain balanced and flexible to the changes of the business goals and benchmarks. Coca Cola UK needs to keep track of the employee performance. Despite the fact that the company keeps investing in the maintenance of the employee portal, more efforts should be directed to the monitoring of the employee lifestyles. Effective management of workplace stress should be a priority for the company, given that workplace stress contributes equally to organizational poor performance (Middlesex University, 2015). Therefore, there is need to support the integrated Human Resource development programs at the Coca Cola UK Company. The company must highlight the coherent and strategic orientation processes in the Human Resource Development that is flexible to the competitive market changes. References Coca Cola Company, (2012). Employee Engagement. The Coca Cola Company. [online] Available at: http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/citizenship/engagement.html [Accessed 3 Jul. 2015]. Investors, Company, Page, Brands, Videos, Sustainability, Innovation, History, Music, Unbottled, Review, 100, EKOCENTER, #cokestyle, Recipes, PlantBottle, Adventurer, Company, Company, Mission, V., System, Workplace, Rights, Leadership, Rankings, History, Reports, Foundation, Report, Investors, Investors, Review, Information, Information, Events, Information, Governance, Filings, Center, Center, Releases, Statements, Articles, Library, Library, Contacts, Careers, Careers, Are, Here, Opportunities, Areas, People, Us, Us, FAQs, and Australia, (2015). Our Company - The Coca-Cola Company. [online] The Coca-Cola Company. Available at: http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/ourcompany/index.html [Accessed 3 Jul. 2015]. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Building the idea of employee engagement: Research and evidence for employee engagement. Employee relations and engagement, week 18, pp.1-125. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Conflict and Dispute Resolution (and a bit on tribunals). Employee relations and engagement, week 13, pp.1-81. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Contribution of Employee relations and engagement to sustainable organisational performance. Employee relations and engagement, pp.1-79. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Discrimination, Difference and diversity. Employee relations and engagement, Week 10, pp.1-81. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Dismissal and Redundancy PLUS Flexibility. Employee relations and Engagement, week 12, pp.1-79. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Organisational Justice, Discipline and Grievance. Employee relations and engagement, Week 11, pp.1-67. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Pay and reward Negotiations. Employee relations and engagement, Week 14, pp.1-40. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Stakeholders and the contexts in which they operate. Employee relations and engagement, Week 3 and week 4, pp.1-81. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Taking the pulse: measuring engagement for a purpose. Employee Relations and Engagement, week 19. Middlesex University, L. (2015). The Employment Relationship and the Psychological Contract.Employee relations and engagement, Week 2, pp.1-56. Middlesex University, L. (2015). The role of leadership and the strategic narrative. The effective and empowered voice. Employee relations and engagement, week 20, pp.1-58. Middlesex University, L. (2015). The role of Line manager behaviour, consistency, integrity and building trust in the organisation. Employee relations and engagement, week 20, pp.1-86. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Theories of Employment Relations and Engagement. Employee relations and engagement, week 5 and week 6, pp.1-92. Middlesex University, L. (2015). Voice and Collective Bargaining. Employee relations and engagement, Week 7, pp.1-75. Read More